Washingtonians hoping to catch a bus in 1975 consulted this friendly-looking hand-drawn map. Charming as it may be, the map has no lines. Rather, designers wrote the name of each bus route over and over along its path through the city.

Transit riders and cartography experts can’t fault the map designers too much. It was more challenging to illustrate detailed networks before the days of computers, and even in recent years some WMATA maps have been just as hard to follow.

Legibility aside, the map actually includes some very progressive elements considering its vintage. According to the legend, it only shows “all-day routes with frequent service,” an incredibly useful idea that’s picked up a lot of steam in the past five years.

Other progressive elements shown on the map include bike paths, although the Mount Vernon and Rock Creek trails appear to be the only ones, and much of its text is translated into Spanish.

The map also includes a fun vignette of the Metrorail system, which had yet to open but was less than a year away.

This incredibly cool map shows the footprints of every building in DC, Arlington and Alexandria, colored according to the predominant race living on that block.

Map from Kenton Ngo at kentonngo.com.

By coloring blocks only according to the most populous race on each block, rather than showing everyone who lives there, this map sacrifices overall diversity to instead show simple majorities. That makes it less racially precise than the famous racial dot maps that have been floating around the internet in recent years.

But the dot maps are too cluttered to show buildings, so making that racial tradeoff allows this map to illustrate the built environment too. It’s a good way to show two disparate pieces of information at the same time.

This is a world population cartogram, a false-geography map that resizes countries according to their population. It’s an interesting way to view the world, and compared to common projections perhaps more accurate, in its own way.

The United States is the world’s fourth largest country by land area, and third largest by population, so it’s not particularly distorted compared to geographic projections. But many other countries are.

China (1.4 billion) and India (1.3 billion) visually dominate, being by far the world’s two most populous countries. Others that stand out with seemingly oversized populations are Nigeria, Bangladesh, Japan, and the Philippines.

On the other end of the spectrum, the world’s two largest countries by land area are much reduced. Russia’s population of 146 million is still good enough for 9th highest globally, but that appears unimpressive against its normally huge area. And Canada, the world’s second largest country but only its 37th most populous, is nothing but a tiny sliver.

In fact, Highway 1 is the longest single highway in the world. It’s 32% longer than Russia’s Trans-Siberian Highway, and almost three times longer than the longest US Interstate, I-90.

The Australian government created Highway 1 in 1955, by compiling a network of existing local and regional highways under a single banner.

Unlike American Interstates, Highway 1 isn’t fully limited access for its entire length. Near big cities like Sydney or Melbourne it looks like an Interstate, but many sections in rural areas are simple two-lane roads, and some extremely isolated sections are even more basic.

In the eastern US, most states top out with maximum speed limits of 70 miles per hour. Out west, most states allow 75, and a handful go even higher than that.

Texas has the highest speed limit in the western hemisphere, at 85 miles per hour. On the other end of the spectrum, no road in Canada’s province Nunavut has a limit above 45 miles per hour.

Germany’s Autobahn famously has no maximum speed limit, but it’s not the only place in the world to hold that distinction. Australia’s Northern Territory is also speed limit free. But don’t try racing down roads in Bhutan, where the maximum limit is no higher than 45.

The most likely path to statehood for the District would shrink the federal city to a tiny section surrounding the National Mall and other federal properties. That section would remain not part of any state. The rest of the city would then become the 51st state, possibly called New Columbia.

DC has had a smattering of bike lanes since at least 1980, but the network only started to grow seriously starting in about 2002. This animation shows the growth of DC’s bike lane network, from 1980 through to 2012.

Animation from Betsy Emmons on MapStory.

From 1980 to 2001, literally nothing changed. Then in 2001, two short new bike lanes popped up. The next year there were 5 new ones. From then on, District workers added several new bike lanes each year, making a boom that’s still going on.

This animation ends in 2012, so it doesn’t include recent additions like the M Street cycletrack. But it’s still a fascinating look at how quickly things can change once officials decide to embrace an idea.

On the map, the red lines show existing bus lanes as of 1976. Blue and black lines show proposals that never materialized. The network reached throughout DC, Northern Virginia, and into Maryland.

Unfortunately, all the bus lanes were converted to other purposes after the Metrorail system was built.

It’s no coincidence or surprise that some of the old bus lanes were on the same streets where they’re now proposed again, like 16th Street and H and I Streets downtown. Those are natural transit corridors, with great need for quality service.

Someday, unless humanity descends into a dark age, we’ll colonize space. Here’s how much land we’ve got to work with, within our solar system.

Image from xkcd.

This chart (it’s not really a map) is to scale for area but obviously not shape. Except Earth’s continents, the shape of the borders are fully the creative license of the illustrator. This simply shows how large each solid planet & moon in our solar system would be, if they were all combined into a single huge continent.